


All Tears Taste of Salt

by PartyLines



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Assisted-Self-Harm, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mark-Alterations, Sexual Content, Virgin!Draco, War, virgin!Hermione
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 05:03:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16469285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartyLines/pseuds/PartyLines
Summary: Two sides of a blade meet at the tip to draw the same blood. Two lost souls can give back to the broken.Written for DFW's Halloween Tropes Fest.





	All Tears Taste of Salt

**Author's Note:**

> Tremendous thank you to my fabulous beta: **zoomzoomzuppa** , who has not only been the stopper-of-meltdowns, holder-of-hands, summarizer-of-things etc, but who has also put up with me tossing out a monstrous story at the last minute and beta-ing a new one! Thank you! (Then I changed some things - surprise)!
> 
> Disclaimer: Not mine, etc...
> 
> My trope was VIRGIN and this is the reincarnation of the very first dramione I wrote.

For seven weeks, three days and twenty-one hours, Hermione had been alone in the neglected Little Cottage on the Hill. It'd been that way on and off for the best part of a year, and she'd grown too used to not knowing - too used to the nothingness that was supposed to be progress.

She'd grown _so_ used to it that she'd lost her breath and fumbled hopelessly for her wand and dashed into the bathroom when Malfoy staggered through the back door, dressed in filthy black robes and clutching at the remnants of a Death Eater mask.

That had been at twenty-one hours and one minute, and three minutes later the declaration they almost missed in the static on the radio changed it all. _He_ changed it all.

The quaver in his voice matched the unfamiliar tremble of his flesh that she'd never be able to reconcile with the boy he was.

_You can make it go away._

His hands shook with such a fervor she wondered how they managed to function at all as he passed the knife - hilt first - for her to take in her steadier grasp. The exquisite dagger - bedecked in diamonds and enamel and engraved with the elegant Malfoy family crest - felt like lead in her grip despite its enchanted balance. She was no longer comfortable with the task ahead of her, but she had _promised_.

Tear-tracks left streaks in the dirt on his face and the glistening shadows in his bottomless pupils made the outside of him mirror the inside of her. Their opposing trajectories had finally met in the middle - here, in this lonely safehouse-bathroom.

Her resolve returned.

Hermione was trembling when she pressed her forehead to his, gulping in his final exhales as a servant to the Dark, and working-loose the antique cufflink from his thin, left wrist. Something like a mixture of a sob - a gasp - a moan broke from his chest when her lips brushed the bridge of his nose, and her fingers danced forgiveness across the lines of his blasphemous tattoo.

Her eyes fell into his and with a determined deftness she forced the crisp edge of his sleeve upward to reveal the marred white arm underneath. An ugly serpent writhed out from the hollow, gaping mouth of the skull, and his flesh squirmed beneath it as if trying, trying, trying to flee. Failing. She closed her eyes - just for a second - and she could _feel_ how much it mattered.

The cold steel of the knife warmed quickly against her palm and she forced herself to look down, instead of into what was left of his soul. Ready, she placed the razor edge of the blade above his wrist and drew a single, narrow line right through the head of the snake. The first stroke was the hardest to finish and she was careful not to delve too deep. His heart splashed quietly in measured drops onto her arm, and slowly, she formed the word. Twelve strokes: straight lines, curved edges and dots - and the bright red bloomed in belated splashes from the newly-opened skin.

By the time she'd finished, he was heavy against her and his head was buried in the crook of her neck. The cries wrenching from his body were as tortured as the nightmares that plagued her in her sleep.

She didn't notice the wetness of her own cheeks until he took the knife from her hand and held it - poised - over her own mark of war-time passed. He nicked the surface and caught the drizzle against his fresh wounds.

"You took mine." He whispered, voice hoarse with everything left unsaid. "Let me take yours."

She nodded and kept the crashing, hurtling, _clawing_ fear ricocheting in her gut even as the bile burned her throat. He grasped her wrist in that same firm hold he'd had when the announcement had come over the wireless, and she knew she didn't have time to change her mind - didn't _want_ to change her mind.

The tips of his fingers were cold against her flushed skin and she shivered as he traced the word he'd introduced her to with callouses he was never meant to have.

War gave people all sorts of things they were never meant to have. Sometimes, they were even things worth keeping.

When the edge of the knife - wet with just a little of Draco's blood - split the healing tissue of her arm, she screamed. It wasn't pain or fright but the memory of a woman standing over her with crazed eyes and a maniacal laugh, and agony - white-hot and never ending. He refused to stop. In any other moment, Hermione would've angered at his dismissal, but as of just an hour ago, the world was new again and she was new with it. So was he. Once, twice, three times she cried out, flashes of crucio too-fresh in her mind. By the time he was done (six winding slashes), all she could do was whimper, the river of sticky tears that rushed down her face pooling in the hollows beneath her eyes and the curve above her lip.

Something in the air changed.

They sat side-by-side in the silence of revolution for a long while. Her whimpers eased and his broken-heaving tempered into quiet trickles. The wind battering the window-panes carried promises of an early winter and the sweet freshness of something good just over the horizon. Hermione felt comfortable for the first time in as long as she could remember - next to a notorious member of the other side, with blood dripping from her arm. Instead of racing off to the meet-point, instead of searching wildly for Harry and Ron, she stayed. She stayed, and when Draco twined their fingers together, she squeezed.

Something in the air changed.

He stared at the dirty, crumbling tiles that lined the wall in front of them, but his attention belonged to her. She shivered when he moved his other hand to run lines up her arm, slowly erasing the ones that'd stood between them for a lifetime.

"Why did you come?" She asked. The answer didn't matter anymore.

"Why didn't you leave?" He finally turned to her and the time-sharpened lines of his weary face struck her as sad. Something defining was missing, as if his pointed arrogance had been sanded back by war.

She liked to think he started it - out of need or loneliness or hope - but she'd never really be sure. Linked fingers and patterns on limbs became fisted hair and whole-hands burrowing under layers of clothes, desperate to find skin. Hermione gasped when his mouth found her neck and he was tasting her flesh - warmth and dirt and salt. She could feel the tremor still there in his tongue as he laved and huffed his way to her lips, taking the bottom one between his, and caging her hips in gripping fingers.

" _Please_ , Granger," he breathed, in that same needy way he'd made her promise; told her he'd stay so long as she made it go away.

She nodded, closed her eyes, and gulped her answer down, sealing it in her throat. There was nothing left to give but herself, and it was morbidly ironic that he needed something from her to survive - after everything. She wondered if maybe she needed something from him now, too.

He stood unsteadily, and she was taken aback by his uncertainty. Awkward and erratic, he looked everywhere but at her as he removed it all - robes, underthings, pants until he was bared for her in a way that no one else had ever been.

"Draco," she called softly, and his gaze landed on her at last - dark and heavy with something akin to desperation. She reached out and took his hand; wrapped his fingers around the hem of her jumper, and he thawed.

Unpracticed and sloppy, Draco wrestled with the jumper until at last Hermione was free. He eyed her uncovered breasts with a barely-controlled lust before taking her face in his hands to kiss her with all the fierceness of a victory he'd never get to taste. Her shaking hands wove into his hair - pulling, yanking, tearing - until he made a keening, primal sound. He fumbled with her trousers, and her knickers only made it to her knees before his erection grazed her thigh. She was jolted into sharp reality, nerves rendering her almost useless, despite the absurdity of it all.

Pulling away - eyes downcast - she murmured, "Um, I. Draco, I -".

"Me neither," he muttered quickly, as though after all they'd lived through it still mattered.

With another nod Hermione pulled him back to her, letting her hands learn his too-thin body and her mouth taste every inch of his regret. He wrapped one of her tiny hands around his erection - offering, encouraging, guiding - and she smiled a tiny smile when he moaned into her mouth. When she felt him prodding at her entrance, she stiffened - almost pushed him away - but the heat of his mouth and soothing skim of his fingers calmed her until she was awash with him and he was inside her. Her breath caught as she gasped, swallowing the whimper of hurt that bubbled up for one swift moment, and then she was lost.

Something in the air changed.

It was frightening and soothing and gratifying all at once. The war had taken their inhibitions and left them wanting and it was rugged and messy and quick. Their mouths clashed, their teeth clinked; hands roamed and explored and experimented. Stifled moans met hushed giggles and sweat met thick, new tears. All they could feel was each other; all they could taste was the salt.

It ended with Draco's breath coming in short, sharp pants, and his back arching - his belly pressing into Hermione's. It ended on his wild, animalistic cry and Hermione's wide, free grin. It wasn't perfect, but neither were they.

When Hermione Granger lost her virginity to Draco Malfoy on a torn-up linoleum floor, she found her innocence. After all the things he'd taken from her, he finally gave something back.

A tiny war was won; equals marked.

As the sunlight filtered in through tattered blinds, they stayed; curled up on the floor of the bathroom of a house they'd leave for good by day's end. Their re-marked arms were side-by-side, his 'Hermione' and her 'Draco' almost completely obscuring their brands-of-horror in the brightness of the morning.

They celebrated.

Exactly nineteen years after Tom Riddle marked Harry Potter as his equal, he was defeated.

The war was won.


End file.
